Posts Tagged ‘nurburgring’

Lewis Hamilton drove one of the best races of his career this weekend at the Nurburgring to take his 16th career win, and first time at the Ring. After qualifying second on Saturday with a stunning lap to split the Red Bulls, he took the lead from polesitter Webber in the first corner to lead the race after the first lap. Alonso, who qualified 4th, jumped Vettel’s Red Bull to take 3rd shortly after, and the 3 top cars from 3 different teams put on a great show battling each other throughout the race.

At the first stops, Webber undercut Hamilton to take the lead, while Alonso rejoined once again in 3rd place. The top 3 maintained a gap of only 3 seconds between each other during this stint. The second set of stops saw some amazing driving from Hamilton. Webber had pitted first to attempt to undercut Hamilton, which almost succeeded. Hamilton pitted a lap later, and came out right ahead of Webber. With cold tires on the McLaren, Hamilton defended Webber’s passing attempt brilliantly to stay ahead. The roles were reversed when Alonso pitted the next lap, coming out in the lead, but in this case Hamilton was able to take advantage and passed Alonso on the outside of turn 2.

By the 3rd and final stops, Hamilton had a sizable lead from the 2, and even though he switched to the slower hard tires, was able to lap faster than the used softs of Alonso and Webber, and was able to maintain the lead for the win. Webber, who gambled on staying out for a few more laps, ended up 3rd behind Alonso when that strategy backfired.

On the last lap, Massa and Vettel, who have been fighting for 4th, pitted together where a slow Ferrari pitstop gave Vettel a spot, who ended up 4th with Massa trailing in 5th. A consistent drive from Adrian Sutil gave Force India a season best 6th place finish.

Once again, F1 delivered yet another intense fist clenching race from start to finish. Next weekend the F1 circus arrives in Hungary, where we hope to see McLaren and Ferarri beat the Bulls again to knock down Vettel’s commanding lead in the 2011 championship.

Round 10 of the 2010 FIA F1 World Championship is upon us this weekend, and the F1 circus is bringing a host of changes (technically, undoing some changes) to the race. Hosted at the GP-Strecke section of the Nürburgring, both Ferrari and McLaren will be trying hard to stop the runaway success of Sebastian Vettel in his Red Bull-Renault. With Vettel leading Ferrari’s Fernando Alonso by 92 points (and McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton/Jenson Button pairing by 95), Vettel can comfortably DNF the next 3 races and still be in a sizable gap to the other lead drivers.

FIA has reverted back to the Valencia spec rules in regards to the off throttle blown diffuser, so we should see the teams claw back some much needed rear downforce on their cars. The McLaren MP4-26 lost a lot of ground with the Silverstone off throttle blown diffuser rules 2 weeks ago, with the change back to Valencia spec rules we should see a close fight with Red Bull at the top. Ferrari’s on the other hand, won the last race with their updated 150 Italia, so expect another strong challenge for the win from the Scuderia. Suffice to say, it should be a great battle between the top 3 teams this weekend.

As a relatively portly sports car, the Nissan GT-R has amazed people the world over by posting blistering lap times on the Nurburgring, far faster than its specifications might allude to. It was rumoured after the initial stock GT-R lap that the car was running on non-production tires, but when a Nissan rep mentioned it was running on “cut slicks” it was brushed aside as a translation error and soon faded from the collective memory. Today, the controversy is back.

7:29? Nien, say some men in laboratory coats.

In their clean white laboratories in Stuttgart, some Porsche engineers got together, analyzed the GT-R data and came to the conclusion that it wasn’t just fast; it was too fast. Something didn’t quite add up, so they did what any men of science would do; they got some stopwatches, some calculators, a driver, a GT-R, two 911’s, and headed for the Green Hell. Ah, Germans. Where would Internet car arguments be without you? Maybe you should have taken a Z06 along as well.

So, what did the driving deacons from Deutschland find? Pretty much what their theoretical calculations told them they should expect. Their chassis designer/Ring expert driver got the 911 Turbo and GT2 around in times of 7:38 and 7:34 respectively. The Nissan, however, couldn’t be persuaded to break the 7:54 mark, over 25 seconds off Nissan’s claimed lap record. Why? We’ll let August Achleitner, Porsche’s 911 product chief, explain.

“This wonder car with 7:29 could not have been a regular series production car. For us, it’s not clear how this time is possible. What we can imagine with this Nissan is they used other tyres.”

He went on to say that the 7:29 time only made sense if the car was running on semi-slick tires, just like it was accused of doing many months ago.

That said, Porsche’s claim is not likely to put a dent in the GT-R’s sales numbers, with the bulk of cars being purchased long before they hit the showroom floor. US $69,850US $76,840? A pittance for a car capable of defying the laws of physics!

In this weekly segment, we cover the top discussions going on in the auto forums. These threads may be the most recent hot topics, or epic threads that we just wanted to dig up and feature.

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Nurburgring Toll Booth Web Cam
With every manufacturer now jumping on board The Ring Performance Benchmark bandwagon, many new cars can be seen being tested on the legendary stretch of road. Check out the live web cam feed and see what cars you can see entering the track.

Ridiculous Properties On the Market
Anyone that has been in the market for a new home will undoubtedly run into homes that are over priced. However, no one ever expects a Pointe of View condo to ever fetch nearly $840 per Square Foot. For $925,000 you can be the lucky owner of an 1,100 square foot condo over-looking the beautiful Co-op parking lot! Luxury, Luxury, Luxury!

Honda Owners Club – New Local Community on Beyond.caHonda owners on beyond thought they would never see the day this would happen. A brand new local community has been added to the forums for the vtec loving car owners on the forums. The reason we never added a Honda section was because over 80% of our membership were Honda owners. So remember, this new section is for vtec discussions. Please take all vtech discussions to the electronics
section.

A split screen video with the ZR1 Corvette and ACR Viper both on their record setting laps. The Viper recently beat the ZR1’s 7:26.4 record with a blistering laptime of 7:22.1. The Viper was stock (except for the race seats and 6 point harness) with the Hardcore Package which sheds 40 pounds. The suspension was stiffened up after a few laps after the driver complained of understeer on the medium to high speed corners.